Say Anything Blog

Earlier today I posted an update on the television series being produced by KVRR news director Jim Shaw (and appearing on the Reiten Broadcasting network) about worker’s compensation issues in North Dakota.  In that post I said that I had a call in to Mr. Shaw himself about whether or not the injured worker interviewed for that segment, one Douglas Brown, had released Workforce Safety and Insurance (North Dakota’s worker’s compensation agency) to talk about his claim.

This evening Mr. Shaw called me back and told me that Brown had signed no such release.  He also told me that he hadn’t asked Brown to sign a release.  And, finally, he told me that he had not asked WSI to comment on Brown’s claim specifically.  To be fair, Shaw did tell me that WSI rebuffed his interview attempts by not commenting at all, but one has to wonder why WSI would talk to Shaw at all when Shaw was going to use testimony from an injured worker that WSI itself cannot, by law, comment on.

It’s not exactly a fair situation.

What we’re left with is this: This television series focused on the #1 issue for North Dakota Democrats in the upcoming election.  It was almost entirely made up of interviews with an injured worker attorney, Mark Schneider, who is the uncle of one of the Democrats’ statewide candidates (Jasper Schneider) as well as Mark Schneider’s injured worker client.  The journalist responsible for it is a guest host for liberal talk radio host Joel Heitkamp who has been harping on the worker’s compensation issue for months now.  They spent most of the interviews commenting on this injured worker’s claim, something to which WSI could offer no rebuttal because this injured worker had not signed a release allowing them to do so nor had the reporter in charge of the story asked him to.

This isn’t journalism.  This is propaganda.  If you want to cover the WSI issue in North Dakota there are more people you can talk to than injured workers, their lawyers, and (with tonight’s segment) disgruntled WSI employees like Jim Long (whose whistle blower case WSI also can’t post on). 

And if you’re going to interview the relative of a candidate for public office for a story directly related to that candidate’s campaign, you had better disclose that relative’s relation.  Jim Shaw didn’t, and that’s just plain shoddy journalism.